Scholarpedia is a peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia written and maintained by scholarly experts from around the world. Scholarpedia is inspired by Wikipedia and aims to complement it by providing in-depth scholarly treatment of topics within the fields of mathematics and sciences including physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences.

Scholarpedia and Wikipedia are alike in many respects:

both allow anyone to propose revisions to almost any article both are "wikis" and use the familiar MediaWiki software designed for Wikipedia both allow considerable freedom within each article's "Talk" pages both are committed to the goal of making the world's knowledge freely available to all Nonetheless, Scholarpedia is best understood by how it is unlike most wikis, differences arising from Scholarpedia's academic origins, goals, and audience. The most significant is Scholarpedia's process of peer-reviewed publication: all articles in Scholarpedia are either in the process of being written by a team of authors, or have already been published and are subject to expert curation.

Prior to publication,

all new articles must first receive sponsorship to validate the identity, authority, and ability of the authors who propose to write it each article undergoes scholarly peer-review, requiring public approval from at least two scholarly experts After publication,

articles appear within the Scholarpedia Journal and can be cited like any other scholarly article the visibility of future revisions to an article is controlled by the article's Curator, usually the article's (most) established expert at time of publication as soon as any individual's revision to an article is accepted, the individual joins a community of recognized (non-author) article contributors the team of article contributors may from time to time act in the Curator's stead when an article curator resigns or is otherwise unable to serve, a new Curator is elected This hybrid model allows Scholarpedia articles to serve as a bridge between traditional